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Campus Dispatches

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How German Higher Education Institutions Collaborate with Industry: The DAAD’s “Germany Today” Tour

By Amy Bridger, Uta Gaedeke, Thomas O. Haakenson, Christine Menand, Michael A. O’Neill, Frank Peters, Christian Schäfer, and Angela K. Wilson

While the focus of the “informational tour” was on institutions in Germany, the insights gained from these first-person encounters and the ensuing development of partnerships have significant implications for European Studies more broadly.

 

Art as a Passport for Learning and Healing in Refugee Camps

By Paul O’Keeffe

The European Union has led the way in terms of integrating art into teaching practices at schools to better enhance the integration and mental well-being of refugee children. Various projects provide learning opportunities and resources for teachers to enable their students to better cope with the realities of their lives in exile.

From the Sorbonne to the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie

By Alain Duplouy

From 1924 to 1931, Paul Bigot built an astonishingly audacious building made of steel and concrete behind an envelope of red bricks mirroring Venetian architecture. In its conception, the Institut d’art et d’archéologie was not only a facility for teaching but also a laboratory, a place for “science in the making.”

The Digital Management of Archaeological Collections: The VERGILIUS Portal

By Vincenzo Capozzoli

The collections of the Department of Art History and Archeology have been at the center of a project aiming at establishing an inventory of, studying, and disclosing the department’s cultural heritage. The VERGILIUS portal stands as an example of digital management for archaeological heritage, offering promising prospects for the future of research, education, and cultural preservation.

Toward an Interdisciplinary Conceptual History of Catastrophe

By Jonathon Catlin

In her masterful 2002 book Evil in Modern Thought, the philosopher Susan Neiman traces an “alternative history of philosophy” from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to the September 11 terror attacks, arguing that the greatest advances in modern philosophy have been driven by the problem of evil, or ways of justifying the suffering of the innocent.

Education for a More-Than-Human World

By Kay Sidebottom

The critical posthumanism of Braidotti and others differs from other strands (actor network theory, transhumanism, anti-humanism, and so on) in that it is not philosophy as such, but a “…theoretically-powered cartographical tool,” or a lens through which to read the world.

How to Solve the Environmental Problem of Climate Migration

By Clarence Dodge

An environmental problem “threatens to tear Nigeria apart,” according to popular media outlets like the Telegraph (Blomfield: 2018). Local farmers in the Middle Belt region (a belt region stretching across Central Nigeria forming a transition zone between Northern and Southern Nigeria) have been engaging in armed conflict with pastoral herders migrating south from an expansive semi-arid area known as the Sahel.

The Migration and Mobilities Working Group at Sarah Lawrence

By Parthiban Muniandy

The Migration and Mobilities working group at Sarah Lawrence College is a core group of faculty from across the social sciences and humanities who have been variously engaged in the interdisciplinary studies of human mobility, displacement crises, migration, and other related themes.

COVID, Compassion, Connection: Pedagogy in the Long 2020

By Eugene Smelyansky

“It is a matter of humanity to show compassion for those who suffer,” opens Giovanni Boccaccio in the prologue to The Decameron. The prologue, and especially the first chapter of Boccaccio’s mid-fourteenth-century masterpiece, are well known to anyone who studies or teaches medieval history or literature.

The Effects of Coronavirus at a Community College

By Carol Anderson

An advantage to teaching a medieval and early modern Western history survey course during a worldwide pandemic is that there is a corresponding historical event that is comparable to the present situation that furnishes a useful exercise for reflection on the human condition.

On Not Teaching the Black Death During COVID-19

By Maria Americo

The pandemic had disastrous effects on New Jersey, a state hit hard early on in the crisis. Saint Peter’s University is a small, tight-knit Jesuit university in Jersey City, the second-most diverse city in the United States, catering to a demographic of mostly students of color.

“The Camino Provides:” Teaching Pilgrimage Online

By Christina Bruno

The Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James, is a network of pilgrimage routes that extends from its endpoint in northwest Spain throughout Europe. It has experienced a surge of global popularity since the late twentieth century thanks in part to movies like The Way and high profile descriptions by writers as diverse as Paulo Coelho and Shirley MacLaine.

Medieval Echoes in Modern Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Esther Cuenca

Like many of our contributors to this pedagogy roundtable, I was caught rather flat-footed when my institution, the University of Houston-Victoria (UHV) in Victoria, Texas, announced that all classes were moving online in March 2020, just a few days after Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had caught the disease and the entire NBA season was postponed.

European Integration after Maastricht: Insights, Novel Research Agendas, and the Challenge of Real-World Impact

By Neculai-Cristian Surubaru, Caterina Di Fazio, Miriam Urlings,Catalina Goanta, Thales Costa Bertaglia Thales, and Mathieu Segers

Along the Maas River, in the far South of the Netherlands, one can find the city of Maastricht. One of the oldest cities in the country, it has been a Roman Empire military stronghold, a cultural and religious center, and the birthplace of the current European Union (EU)

A Roundtable on Maastricht University Student Research

By Patrick Bijsmans

Our students tend to look into a broad range of topics, from Euroscepticism in the European Parliament, to decolonization and its impact on contemporary societies in and outside of Europe. They draw from questions regarding the development of democracy in Europe or culture in Europe’s border regions.

Virtual Reality Meets Language Teaching

By Tricia Thrasher

So, how exactly can VR benefit language learning? Is it just another fad? How complicated is it to actually use? Many educators may find themselves asking these questions in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic that has forced a vast majority of traditional face-to-face language teaching to transition online.

Mapping the “Material Substrate” as Analysis of the Capitalocene

By Megan Dixon

Even as we ask students to examine their individual environmental choices and to review broader-scale proposals for reduction of carbon emissions, it is important to help them appreciate the degree of material commitments embodied by the Capitalocene, so that they realize the full extent of the work necessary to reconceptualize the infrastructure of the future.

Studying Migration in a Study Abroad Setting

By Emanuel Rota

The American experience of the Age of Mass Migration in the first two decades of the twentieth century teaches us that, despite the documentable economic benefits for the host country, nativist politicians are very effective in mobilizing sectors of the local populations against newcomers.

From French Studies to World War II and Beyond: A Reminiscence

By Richard J. Golsan

Like other young academics entering their careers at that point in time, I anticipated a life of researching and teaching the beauties and subtleties of French literature and, with luck and hard work, of establishing myself one day as one of the world’s leading authorities on Montherlant, and who knew, perhaps even on modern and contemporary French theater?

Medievalism, Nationalism, and European Studies: New Approaches in Digital Pedagogy

By Esther Liberman Cuenca

Patrick Geary contended in The Myth of Nations (2002) that the rise of ethno-nationalism, as a response to the ascendancy of the European Union, was inseparable from the weaponization of the middle ages. Nationalism, in both its current and nineteenth-century iterations in Europe, has always paid homage to the ghosts of an imagined past, one that frequently collapses the medieval with the modern present.

What is the Scholar’s Role in Apocalyptic Times?

By Martha McCaughey and Scott Welsh

In an era of melting glaciers, genocide, starvation, and species extinction, what is a scholar working at a college or university to do? Many of us feel an urgent pull to be useful, lamenting our privileged position in the ivory tower.

The “I Learn America” Project: Vassar College and Migrant Narratives from Poughkeepsie, NY  

By Tracey Holland

For too many years now, millions of uprooted children and young people have fallen between the cracks, unseen among the data. Not only do they face discrimination and isolation as they seek to make new lives for themselves, but many do not have access to national or local services, and are never accounted for by the various child-protection systems as they cross borders.

Conversations Unbound: Student Engagement with Migration through Language Learning

By Elise Shea, Camelia Suleiman, and Eva Woods Peiró

Conversations Unbound (CU) is an organization that connects college students learning languages with forcibly displaced individuals who work as online tutors. As an initiative launched by Vassar students under Professor Maria Höhn’s guidance as faculty mentor and founder of Vassar Refugee Solidarity (VRS), CU embodied VRS’s commitment to rethink existing vertical models of humanitarian engagement with displaced populations and to innovate horizontal models that allow for more democratic interactions.

The Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG): Developing the Digital World Together

By Eero Hyvönen

The digital world with its digitized resources, such as the Web with its data, services, and applications, is changing the society in fundamental ways and creating opportunities and challenges for globalization. Digitalization provides ever more new research opportunities in the humanities and social sciences, and rapidly changes ways in which research is done. These developments create a growing need for novel research and education in the emerging multidisciplinary field of Digital Humanities (DH).

Linked Data in Use: Sampo Portals on the Semantic Web

By Eero Hyvönen

A fundamental semantic problem in publishing and using Cultural Heritage (CH) data on the Web, is how to make the heterogeneous CH contents semantically interoperable, so that they can be searched, interlinked, and presented in a harmonized way across the boundaries of the datasets and data silos.

Learning from Challenges in the Arid West: Stanford’s Water in the West

By Leon F. Szeptycki and Newsha Ajami

The American West is an arid region to begin with, and climate change, population growth, and aging infrastructure are further exacerbating water scarcity in some parts of the region. Stanford University established Water in the West in 2010 to conduct research relevant to the growing water challenges in the American West and to develop solutions that will move the region toward a more sustainable water future.

Columbia Water Center

By Upmanu Lall

Founded in January 2008, the Columbia Water Center (CWC) is committed to understanding and addressing both the role and scarcity of fresh water in the 21st century. The CWC was established for the purpose of studying the diminishing levels of fresh water and creating innovative sustainable and global solutions. CWC combines multidisciplinary academic research with solutions-based fieldwork to develop and test creative responses to water challenges around the world.

The Radical Right in the Global Context

By Cynthia Miller-Idriss

The evening event, held from 5-7 pm followed by a reception, will include speakers from North America and Europe working on scholarship, policy and practice related to extreme and radical right politics, movements, organizations, and subcultural youth scenes.

Water Footprint Network: Using the Water Footprint Concept to Promote Sustainable, Fair, and Efficient Fresh Water Use

By Joep Schyns    

Water footprints can be calculated for an individual person, a process, a product’s entire value chain, or for a business, a river basin, or a nation. They provide powerful insights for businesses to understand their water-related business risk, for governments to understand the role of water in their economy and water dependency, and for consumers to know how much water is hidden in the products they use.

On the Path to a European University

By Janosch Nieden

In the heart of Europe, tradition meets innovation. In the trinational Upper Rhine region, shared by Germany, France, and Switzerland, five universities within a distance of only 200 kilometers are forming a European Campus.

The Oxford Water Network: Securing Water for Sustainable Development

By Dustin Garrick

Water is vital for human well-being, economic development and a healthy environment. Each year shocks such as floods and droughts have devastating impacts on people and economies worldwide. Ensuring access to an acceptable quantity and quality of water, and protection from water-related shocks is a defining challenge for society in the 21st century.

Water-related Activities at the University of Copenhagen, SCIENCE

By Mette Frimodt-Møller

A wide range of research is conducted into water at the University of Copenhagen, and collectively, it covers the whole water cycle. The research includes, for example, the interaction between soil, water, and biological production, water quality in developing countries, and modelling of how pollutants are transported via water.

Our City, Our Streets!

By Esther Dischereit

Three months after the Nazi march and terror attack in Charlottesville, a film that seeks to unearth what exactly happened there on August 12, 2017 celebrated its premiere in the very same place.The film, directed by Brian Wimer and Jackson Landers, is called Charlottesville: Our Streets.

The Past in the Present: Transatlantic Teaching and Research Collaboration on Memory, Responsibility, and Transformation

By Manuela Achilles and Hannah Winnick

The violence of white supremacists in Charlottesville, the enduring debate over Confederate symbols and statues, and the broader reemergence of a nationalist political rhetoric that harkens back to a mythical Golden Age have left many Americans (especially also young Americans) hungry for a national conversation about their country’s history and collective memory. There is a renewed urgency not only to reckon with the past, but to more deeply understand history’s architectural power over society today.

Collective Response: Moving Forward Initiative of the UVa College of Arts and Science

By Manuela Achilles and Matthew Burtner

After the events of August 11-12, faculty, staff, and students of the UVa College of Arts & Sciences responded quickly and thoughtfully with events and programming that interrogated what happened, the history behind it, the legal and social context, and much more. Performance and art events swiftly organized by students and faculty demonstrated that our community rejects the hatred and violence on display on our campus and the city of Charlottesville.

First Response: A Reading List

By Kyrill Kunakhovich, Manuela Achilles, and Janet Horne

This reading list provides links to first responses of UVa faculty and students to the rallies of white supremacists and neo-Nazis on University Grounds and in downtown Charlottesville.

Jefferson’s Two Bodies: Interpretations of a Statue at the University of Virginia

By Isaac Ariail Reed 

On the night of September 12, 2017, a group of students shrouded the statue of Jefferson. They did so in memoriam of Heather Heyer, who was killed a month before by a white supremacist when she was protesting the fascist rally in downtown Charlottesville on August 12. They did so in protest of the university’s paltry response to the violent fascists on its lawn — and at this same statue — on the night of August 11.

Launching the Roma People’s Project at Columbia University

By Cristiana Grigore

About twenty-five years ago, I vowed that no one would ever find out that I was a Gypsy from Romania, and I remember clearly the day when, as a little girl, I fiercely decided to keep my embarrassing origins a secret. I would have never guessed that after years of denial and secrecy there would be a time when I would not only speak openly and proudly about my Roma identity, but also create a project for Roma People.

The Vassar Refugee Solidarity Initiative

By Anish Kanoria

According to the UNHCR, there are now more than 65 million forcibly displaced persons in the world. In sheer numbers, this is the largest displacement of people since the Second World War. It is a generational phenomenon that is global in its impact and local in its effect. The Vassar Refugee Solidarity initiative was inspired by and started in response to this realization.

 

The Pedagogy of Memory: A Workshop on Teaching in an Emerging Field

By Jonathan Bach and Sara Jones

The question of teaching memory extends beyond the question of competing canons from those disciplines for whom memory tends to be a discrete object of study, such as psychology, literature, sociology, and history (though of course not limited to these). Following the spirit of the conference, we were interested in thinking about the teaching of memory from within and across such disciplines, and what it would mean to create interdisciplinary sub-fields.

World War I American Immigrant Poetry: A Digital Humanities Project

By Lorie A. Vanchena

The World War I American Immigrant Poetry project at the University of Kansas creates a single source for these digitized poems as well as for accompanying scholarly annotations and contextual material. We seek to preserve these historical voices by making the poetry available online to academics, teachers, students, and the general public.

The Mid-Hudson Refugee Solidarity Alliance

By Maria Höhn

If we want to prepare our undergraduate students for this new reality, we need to be a part of researching, analyzing, and designing curriculum innovations that give our students the capacities and skills to engage with what will be global challenge for decades to come.